The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier

by Ian Urbina

I had seen this problem often in the maritime world. What few worker protections existed at sea usually applied to the ships that needed them least.

As a hobby, Hardberger’s dad regularly captured and froze snakes so he could preserve their skeletons to use in classes. He would put their carcasses on top of a fire-ant pile he had built years earlier in the backyard. Over the next several weeks, the ants would pick the skeleton clean, which he would then spray with adhesive and transfer to a mounting board.

The boys regularly went target shooting in the nearby swamps but never hunted actual game. “Just seemed like an unfair fight,” Hardberger said about hunting animals.

Therein lies the beauty of international ship thievery: crooks only have to run if someone’s chasing them, and that’s rarely the case.

If the ocean serves as the vast space in the global economy that must be crossed to connect producers and consumers, then mariners are the go-betweens, living their ghostly lives afloat, invisible, and constantly in motion as they help move commodities from one port to another.

Over the past decade, no country has exported more seafarers annually than the Philippines, which provided roughly a quarter of the crews on merchant ships globally, despite comprising less than 2 percent of the world’s population.

The process began feeling like explanation for its own sake. That single abiding certainty at the core of journalism, that there was merit in bearing witness and giving voice to those who lacked it, felt much less than certain. Still, I clung to the hope that by my putting the information out there, other people might use it somehow to change things. Deep down inside, though, I wondered if these were legitimate motivations or professional delusions.

About 150 miles off the coast of Brazil, I climbed into a tiny two-person submarine and wondered if I had made a terrible mistake.

This showdown in Brazil was a stark reminder that the seafloor is earth’s final frontier, a lawless and enigmatic domain of vast mineral wealth and undiscovered biological diversity. Arguably the least policed realm on the planet, the sea bottom is also a world over which scientists, conservationists, industry, and governments routinely tussle for access and control.

The missing patches of forest were conspicuous proof that Brazil’s struggle to protect its habitat was as much an onshore fight as an offshore one. For all the stories I’d heard about deforestation, none prepared me for seeing these jagged, burned patches carved into the rain forest. It left me with a deep foreboding feeling of inevitability, like you get when you watch an injured prey being chased down by a healthy predator. This is not going to end well, I thought.

What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams. —Werner Herzog,

“Life at sea is cheap,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division. Conditions are worsening, he said, because of lax maritime labor laws and an insatiable global demand for seafood, even as overfishing depletes fish stocks.

The trafficker then sold Long to a boat captain for about $530, less than the going price for a water buffalo. He was then herded with six other migrants up a gangway onto a shoddy wooden ship. It was the start of three brutal years of captivity at sea, during which Long was resold twice between fishing boats.

Once a load of fish was transferred to a mother ship, it was combined with other catch below deck in cavernous refrigerators, and there was almost no way for port authorities to determine its provenance. It became virtually impossible to know whether it was caught legally by paid fishermen or poached illegally by shackled migrants.

After returning to port, Som Nang contacted Stella Maris, which began raising the 25,000 baht, roughly $750, needed to buy Long’s freedom. I remember being sickened when I heard this number: the price of Long’s life was less than my plane fare from D.C. to Bangkok.

Over the years, readers of the Times have often emailed me to ask how I get people to talk so candidly about things that might not reflect on them well. I rarely have a good answer for this question except to say that I am perpetually surprised in this line of work by how much people want to tell their own story. As a reporter, I’ve found that if a person sizes you up and decides that you seem trustworthy, he typically will talk.

Sometimes it paid to be coy, others times nakedly transparent. I’m not especially good at the former; I’ve been told that my eyes project information like a ticker tape.

You bank a lot on your instincts, which, at this point, are usually deeply hampered by exhaustion. It is what the New York Times Delhi bureau chief, Jeffrey Gettleman, once described as the “transitive property of trust.” Reporters invest their lives in it all the time, he said. People you trust put you with people they trust who pass you to others they trust. The longer it gets, the more you hope the chain will hold.

When there was food to be had during my reporting for this book, it was often an adventure. At home, I’m a vegetarian. When I travel, I eat what’s put in front of me. To say no to an offer of food would have been as socially appropriate as spitting indoors. “Sea bug soup,” raw squid on rice, the aggressively pungent durian—some of what was served took fast chewing, closed eyes, and ample chasers.

I stank too. My pants were smudged with fish guts, my shoes caked in ripe chum. But as much as I wanted to wash away the accumulated filth during some of these trips, bathing was less inviting because it entailed standing fully exposed on the back deck and pouring a bucket of seawater over myself. The most intensive fishing happened at night, filling the back deck with tackle and busy men. That meant broad daylight was usually the only option for using the deck to bathe.

I was practiced at tolerating pungent odors, but this room was unusually challenging. Squeeze the fluids out of some old football pads, add urine and pureed fish to the liquid, and boil it: such was the steamy aroma in that nook.

When I described to these officers my reporting at sea and polled them for ways I might heighten my chances of survival if I ended up in the water (I’m a decent swimmer), they looked at me as if I’d asked how to patch my wrist if I decided to cut off my hand. “Best plan is to avoid it,” deadpanned one pilot.

He cocked his chin in the direction of a handgun lying on the dash near the wheel. “You have to show them,” he said about teaching the crew a lesson. The nonchalance on his face reminded me of a saying that truly dangerous men are not of a certain size but of a certain look.

Of all the evil things I saw while reporting for this book, the karaoke bars in Ranong were perhaps the most sinister. Not only did these brokers and bar owners use one type of trafficked migrant to entrap another type of trafficked migrant, but the sex workers and their indebted clients were both, quite often, children. When I finally left Ranong, I hoped never to return.

At one point, I stood alongside a captain in the wheelhouse of a purse seiner as inspectors conducted their sweep. The captain’s clothes reeked of cigarette smoke, his breath was stale, and empty cans of Red Bull littered the floor around his feet. In front of the wheel were five human skulls, which the captain said he kept for good luck, having pulled them up in nets. The story seemed dubious to me. Quietly, I surmised that the skulls were more likely meant as a reminder of the consequences of insubordination.

At one point, I asked a captain if he thought any of the workers on his ship might be unhappy and want to go home. “They cannot,” he told me. “My papers are all in order.” His remark inadvertently summed up for me why these inspections seemed to miss their mark.

The relentless gut-punch reality for me, though, was how completely the framework of a civilized society was abandoned at sea, especially on fishing boats on the South China Sea. Thailand, it seemed to me, was genuinely trying to face these realities. But tall obstacles remained, including corruption and ineffective inspections.

Slavery is a harsh reality that our better angels would like to think ended two centuries ago, when many countries passed laws against such bondage within their borders. But this sort of bondage is a global blind spot, because governments, companies, and consumers either don’t know it occurs or, when they do, prefer to look the other way.

You wouldn’t think you could kill an ocean, would you? But we’ll do it one day. That’s how negligent we are. —Ian Rankin, Blood Hunt

For centuries, humanity has viewed the ocean as a metaphor for infinity. The assumption was—and frankly still is for many people—that the enormity of the sea came with a limitless ability to absorb and metabolize all. This vastness is what lends the ocean deity-like potential. And more narrowly, it is also what has provided us over the years with the license to dump virtually anything offshore.

Over time, I realized the abused fishermen I talked to and the illegal fishing vessels they worked on were just one tiny part of a vast ecosystem. Looking at exploitation of the ocean required looking at the ocean itself—not as a passive backdrop, a canvas for bad behavior, but as a living organism in its own right, a creature that men and women skate across the surface of, like the sea lice that cling to the skin of a whale. It wasn’t enough for me to study the lice; I needed to understand the whale as well and how its parasitic passengers were making it sick.

The cruise ship industry is one of the more bizarre creations of modern society, a floating jumble of contradictions. It peddles freedom and exploration, but the actual experience is designed to be predictable, choreographed, and familiar—like a Vegas hotel with an amusement park. It advertises the great outdoors, but mostly keeps people distracted from it with ice-cream Sunday bars, waterslides, and go-kart tracks (yes, go-kart tracks).

The cruise industry represents a kind of gentrification of the ocean; with enough money and steel and aluminum and all-you-can-eat buffets, anyone can enjoy the very best the oceans have to offer without the unsavory parts.

The practice of ships dumping oil and other waste at sea was perfectly legal for most of maritime history. And dump we did. After World War II, Russia, the U.K., and the United States loaded about a million tons of unexploded mustard gas bombs and other chemical munitions onto ships, which were dispatched offshore to scuttle the matériel overboard. Those munitions continue to haunt fishing boats the world over.

As violence at sea has grown so too has the market for private security forces offshore. Indeed, the oceans are becoming militarized, awash in guns like never before. Over the past decade, Somali piracy led many governments to encourage merchant vessels to arm themselves or hire maritime mercenaries, a break from the long-standing practice of nations claiming a near monopoly on the use of force at sea.

That created a paradox: security-conscious countries want greater law and order on the seas, but they don’t want arms coming into their countries from offshore. Everyone should arm themselves, the logic went, but no one was allowed to bring those arms into their territory.

“It’s like handing a bachelor a newborn,” one guard complained, describing how some of the new recruits reacted when given an automatic weapon.

To describe this stonewalling as frustrating would be an understatement. Getting the runaround is an occupational hazard in journalism, but I have found in my years of investigative reporting that there is usually someone in a position of authority who is willing to help twist arms to get the kind of information I was seeking. Concerns about reputational damage can also motivate companies or governments to make at least a minimal effort to respond to a reporter. Not so in the maritime world, where all the actors seem to set their own ethical and moral compasses in different directions.

On the “maritime merry-go-round,” no one answers for wrongdoings at sea, the lawyer explained. If they do, it’s only to send you and your questions to someone else. It’s an insular world, and people in it work to keep it that way.

One of the worst parts of doing this work is the haunting feeling that you might be engaging in misery porn and that you are making theater of so much evil while doing so little to correct it.

My reporting in Somalia had not led to where I expected. Perhaps I should have known better. Really, who travels to a failed state looking for good news? From the moment I touched down in Mogadishu my journalistic compass had not stopped spinning. I strained to understand who could be trusted and which, if any, of the many armed groups patrolling the waters was in the right.

I resigned myself to the idea that the only thing worse than telling a tale of abuse over and over again was not telling it all.

Despite a global moratorium on whaling, the Japanese argued that their hunt was part of a scientific program to collect data that they said would prove that there were plenty of whales in the sea and that stocks were not being depleted.

Absolutely disgusting

While the Japanese hunt the whales and Sea Shepherd tries to block them, the whales track the ships hunting longline toothfish. In a phenomenon known as depredation, whales routinely shadow these boats, sometimes for hundreds of miles, waiting for their lines to fill with fish. When captains begin retrieving their catch, the churning of the winch motor that tugs the fishing line makes a distinctive sound. This sound serves as an underwater dinner bell for the whales. Before crews can pull the fish on board, the whales attack the lines, stripping them clean. On a clear day, when sound underwater travels farthest, whales can hear this dinner bell from more than fifteen miles away.

A grown whale can scrape all the fish from a five-mile line in under an hour. To avoid snaring their own mouths, the whales bite off the fish just below the hooks. Sometimes all that’s left behind, he said, are fish lips dangling from the lines. More experienced whales bite the line, shaking loose the fish so they can eat them whole.

On the island, the sun did not set until around 11:00 p.m., but even then the moon was so bright that the scene was more glowing than dark. Overlooking the bay, I watched and listened to the whales sleep—half a dozen humpbacks that looked about fifty feet long drifting to the surface, exhaling steamy geysers, then sinking again for several minutes. It felt as if I had snuck into a den of hibernating behemoths.

Through time, humanity’s capacity, both legally and scientifically, for extracting life from the oceans has greatly surpassed our ability to protect it.

In studying the impact of these boats, I felt as if I were witnessing another part of the Antarctic cycle of predation and depredation. The Japanese hunted the whales, while Sea Shepherd hunted the Japanese. The whales stole the toothfishermen’s meals, while the vacuum boats stole food from the whales.